Small Improvements

Boom! Five new developers on one day.

The hiring drought in our Berlin HQ is over! Our development team just grew from 8 to 13 developers, and we’ve been able to find a perfect mix too: We’re joined by two Java developers (Alison and Tobias, left-center and right), two AngularJS developers (Alexandre and Peter, middle) and one UI/UX developer (Kristof, left).

Five in one day? Surely we’ve lowered our expectations?

Not at all. 2014 was a very slow year, but since October we’re seeing a really steady stream of good applications. It took us a while to get there: Lots of employer branding, conference attendance and sponsorships, meet-ups and blog posts, and of course ads on BSJ were required, but the work has finally paid off. And our grilling process has remained exactly the same as always: Informal phone call, one or two on-site interviews, and then 2 days of trial work. No magic, just friendly applicant-grilling.

Admittedly, it’s sheer coincidence that everyone wanted to start on the same date. We made an offer to Peter as early as February, and then we inked contracts with Tobias and Alison in March. For a long time we thought that was it, until Kristof and Alexandre signed up merely three weeks ago, also with a starting date of June 1st. Crazy!

So in summary, there’s no secret sauce, and our applicant pipeline is now dry. 🙁

What’s next?

The first week was a huge success already, we’ve conducted a proper on-boarding exercise that included plenty of technical presentations, meet&greet with the international CS team, pair-programming and naturally computer setup. It’s Friday evening now, and the first small feature improvements are already on master and deployed to production.

We’ve expanded each sub-team a bit (5 on objectives, 4 on user-import, 4 on the improvements team) and then most likely we’ll move to a 4-subteams-config once everyone has truly settled in. We’re not expecting miracles during the first couple of weeks, but since the grilling process was pretty intense we’re very confident that our feature&refactoring-throughput will increase substantially. Go team!